by Gerald Biss
“So am I,” said Manders. “Osgood here can telephone after lunch and tell Clymping that we are both inviting ourselves down for a week in the country, even if we should chance to run up to town for a few hours, if we get bored. My wife’s away up north with her sister; and I’ll wire her to stay on for a few days. I’ll drive you both down by car this afternoon, calling here for you, Blenkinsopp, at four; and, if you are busy, we will wait in the Black Museum, if Osgood hasn’t seen it. How will that suit?”
“Splendid,” said I, greatly heartened; “and I know Burgess will not only be delighted, but devoutly grateful to you both, especially when he learns the whole truth. Moreover, God knows I shall be glad beyond all telling to have you two by me, when I have to enlighten him and convince him of the strange truth. It will be an awful blow to him, especially as far as it touches poor Dorothy Wolff.”
They both nodded gravely; and it brought us back to the matter in hand and the grim reality of things.
“It complicates a beastly job by bringing in the personal element a bit too acutely,” said Manders grimly: “but, by gad, we’ve got to see it through and lay old Père Garou by the heels at all costs, together with his unpleasant old Anna. Please God, there is still some hope for the girl.”
“Amen,” we both said fervently, praying more and truly from the bottom of our hearts than we had done for many long years, reverting unconsciously to the training and instincts of early youth in the hour of stress, with an absolute lack of self-consciousness, which makes men in the ordinary way disguise their deepest feelings with a quip or a veneer of cynicism.
“More cheese?” asked Blenkinsopp, pushing the plate towards me and relieving the situation. “No? All right then. Off you two get as soon as ever you like, and be back at four sharp. I will do my best to be through by then.”
We took our dismissal with a laugh and rose from our seats.
“Right-oh,” said Manders, resuming his usual cheery tone. “We’ll be here in good time.”
We took a taxi to the club, where Manders ‘phoned Pycombe, telling him to bring the car round at a quarter to four with his kit, and telegraphed to his wife; while I trunk-called Burgess, advising him of our arrival between half-past five and six. He was delighted to hear that I was bringing Manders and Blenkinsopp for the week-end; and I promised to explain everything fully upon our arrival. It was characteristic of him that he asked no questions, but took the situation for granted.
“I’ll tell Ann to have their rooms ready,” was all he said; and I knew that he, like myself, was at heart more than thankful that we should have two such sound coadjutors by our side in the hour of climax, which, though ignorant of its actual character, he knew to be heading up according to our expectations.
***
The impeccable Pycombe was inevitably punctual, driving the car himself, though not in uniform; and he was obviously disappointed when Manders took the wheel from him and told him that he should not want him.
“The fewer on the spot, the better,” he said to me as we drove down Whitehall, “outside the actual actors in the forthcoming Drury Lane drama in real life; and I can always send for him if I want him. I can guarantee him as secret as the grave: but he can’t shoot.” I nodded.
“I’ve got my shooting squad made up in my mind,” I answered, “subject, of course, to Burgess’s approval and that of Blenkinsopp and yourself. I want it to be a strictly amateur team as far as possible.”
Blenkinsopp did not keep us waiting more than five minutes. He was followed by a plain clothes officer with his bag.
“Chief Inspector Boodle,” he explained, “my right-hand confidential man, who may prove invaluable. I shall tell him everything in due course: but at the house he will simply appear amongst the servants as my valet.”
We were a silent party on the way down, Blenkinsopp sitting in front beside Manders, while I sat in the back with Boodle and the kit-bags, deep in thought. We all felt that at length we were really launched upon our grim hazard for better, for worse, playing for higher stakes than we had ever dreamt of—human lives, perhaps our own, and at least one human soul.
In Redhill an “A.A.” scout took our number and warned us of police-traps, and Blenkinsopp thanked him with ironic effusiveness; and beyond that point I noticed, with interest, that the road was well patrolled by police, both mounted and on foot. The scout was right, and twice we found ourselves in traps; but Blenkinsopp’s badge, when shown, produced a complete change of front from aggressiveness to apology.
Mutton was awaiting us in Crawley, as instructed by telephone by Blenkinsopp, who advised him that he had come down to take charge until further notice, though the fact was to be kept a profound secret, and that he would be installed at Clymping Manor as headquarters. Mutton was to call there for orders either from Blenkinsopp or, in his absence, from Boodle, and keep in touch by telephone. It saved Mutton’s face locally and with the wider public; and, at the same time, it suited Blenkinsopp’s book to leave him ostensibly in charge.
“I shall have to use poor Mutton as a blind,” he said, with a little laugh, as we started off afresh: “but I can make it up to him later, as it is really not his fault, after all, that he has not got to the bottom of this business.”
Burgess greeted us all warmly; and Boodle, playing his part, was handed over to Jevons, while we greeted Ann in the hall and settled down to tea and buttered toast.
“Chocolates,” I said, after she had kissed me, “for a good little girl, or, rather, a buxom young nurse.”
Shut up, Linc,” she said, laughing. “You’ll make me bilious and unfit me for my arduous duties.”
“And how is your patient?” I inquired.
“He is doing splendidly,” she answered; “and to-morrow Sir Harry Verjoyce and Mr. Wellingham are coming down to lunch, and are to be allowed to see him for a few minutes. He seems worried about something, and has been begging to he allowed to see them: so Sir Humphrey thought it better that he should see one, if not both.”
“Well, don’t worry him with any news of our arrival, Miss Clymping, at present at any rate,” said Blenkinsopp, passing his cup for more tea. “It can serve no good purpose at the moment, and might worry him. The less he ever remembers of this ghastly business, the better for him in the future. From what I learn from inquiries in town, I don’t fancy that his affair with Miss St. Chair was quite so serious as the romantic or the prurient public tried to persuade itself; and it was certainly on the wane, as both Verjoyce and Wellingham will, I am sure, confirm. She was quite a good girl and the best of company: but now that she is, I fear, beyond recall, it can do nobody any good to rake up the harrowing details, especially in the case of an invalid who has had such a severe shock both mentally and physically.”
I noticed a queer little look, as though of relief, pass over Ann’s pretty face; and I chimed in to save her from answering.
“Yes, I quite agree with Major Blenkinsopp,” I said; “and, Ann dear, you must try to let that part of the matter rest yourself. It does not concern you, and you can do no good: and I hate to think of you mixed up in these horrors. I know you are wonderfully capable for your age, but you are too young: and it is quite outside your sphere.”
“I’m with you both,” broke in Burgess in his serious way, taking her hand in his almost fatherly fashion. “You stick to the nursing, dear, and leave the rest to us.”
Ann nodded in her funny little way.
“Yes, I suppose it is best,” she said, with a touch of reluctance. “I’ll try to do what you all advise. I do try never to think of the horror of the whole thing.”
And then I changed the subject, and began telling her about our being police-trapped and the constables’ faces when they saw Blenkinsopp’s special badge.
“Your Sussex and Surrey police are the limit,” I said, laughing: “and there is old Burge, who sits on the local bench once a week and doles out heavy fines upon the poor unfortunate mice who are trapped, while he himself never dreams of
keeping within the limit.”
“No, he doesn’t,” said Ann, taking up the cudgels on behalf of her adored big brother; “he always protests solemnly and dissents from—well, I mustn’t mention names, or he will be angry with me, and give me a little lecture upon youth and indiscretion when he gets me alone.”
“You’re a saucy little minx, my dear Ann,” I said solemnly, “and could do with a good spanking at times as well as a mere lecture. Your brother is too kind and gentle to you. Now if I were your brother…”
“Thank heaven you’re not,” interrupted Ann, making her eleven-year-old face at me. “If you were, I’d ruin away or do something awful! Have a chocolate, Mr. Manders?”
Manders took one, and kept the ball rolling till Ann announced that it was tine for her to go upstairs and attend to her hospital duties; and it was not far off dressing-time before we were left alone with Burgess.
“Burge, old chap,” I said without any beating about the bush, “we have got a lot of very strange things to tell you and lay before you for your judgment: but it is hardly worth while starting before dinner, as it is a pretty long matter, and will take some time to thresh out in detail. So we had better put it off till after dinner. Send Ann to bed early on some excuse or other, as things must be kept from her as far as possible; and then we four can adjourn to the library and get our teeth into it properly. So far I can tell you, strange and horrible as the whole thing is, I—or rather we, Manders and myself—have been successful up to the difficult point of convincing Scotland Yard itself, including the Chief in person; and Blenkinsopp is down here as the result, if not as a coadjutor, at least as an official referee. However, we will make that, and the position as a whole, quite clear to you this evening. Meanwhile, we must be cheerful in front of Ann, and keep her right out of the wretched business ahead. What’s wrong with a bronx before dinner? Shall I mix one?”
“Good scheme,” said Manders, as Burgess rang the bell for Jevons and the ingredients: and the cocktails filled up the hiatus pleasantly till dressing-time.
II
Outwardly we were a merry enough party at dinner, though Burge was a bit quiet and evidently thinking deeply; but it was not particularly noticeable, as he is naturally inclined to be quiet if there are several people talking nonsense, and Ann could have had no idea that we were all, so to speak, sitting on a dump of high explosives waiting to strike matches—at least, that was the sort of feeling at the back of my mind, as we worked through Ann’s excellent, but substantial dinner—her pet theory in life being that man must be well fed to keep him in a good temper. So far it had proved right, as the men who frequented Clymping were in the main young, and had not yet reached the dyspeptic age.
Burgess told me that he had given her the tip to retire at half-past nine and leave us alone to business.
“As I am to be sent off to bed at half-past nine,” she announced in her delightfully candid way, when Jevons put the port on the table, “I shall stay with you till then, so that you shall not lose a single minute more than is necessary of my charming company. Besides, I can’t go and sit in the drawing-room all alone and talk to myself like a jibbering idiot, can I, Mr. Manders?”
He laughed.
“Not when there is such port as this knocking about,” he said. “Port is, I believe, the weak point in the moral armour of the female—that and gin.”
“Gin!” exclaimed Ann, making a face. “How horrid! “Splendid in cocktails,” I said. “You ought to have waited downstairs before dinner instead of rushing off precipitately to your pallid patient. It is the one thing I can do—sling a cocktail.”
I noticed, with a little start, the colour come into her cheeks when I referred to Bullingdon; and I began to wonder, my thoughts for the first time wandering in a new train.
And so the irony of light, meaningless conversation, as so often in life, but seldom quite so tensely, was kept up to cover the volcano below that might boil over at any moment.
As the clock struck half-past nine Ann rose. “Time all good little girls were in bed,” she said, making a little mock curtsey. “Good night, gentlemen: I will leave you to your business.”
Burgess held the door open for her, and kissed her as she passed out into the hall. Then he turned round to us.
“Yes, and now to business,” he said very gravely. “You can perhaps imagine how painfully anxious I am to hear what you have to tell, and what plans you have evolved to meet the exigencies of the circumstances. Let us go straight into the library.”
On the table there were cigars, decanters and glasses, with a couple of syphons in coolers; and Burgess rang the bell, as we seated ourselves.
“We do not want to be interrupted on any account, Jevons,” he said, when his man appeared—“that is, unless anything urgent should arise. You can lock up and send everyone off to bed. If the telephone should ring I will answer it myself. We shan’t want anything else. Good night, Jevons.”
“Good night, sir,” said the man, withdrawing and closing the door behind him.
Then Burgess faced round to me almost abruptly, with his under jaw pushed out a bit in a way I know well.
“Now, Linc,” he said, “let me hear everything. ‘I have waited long enough.”
“God knows you have, dear old friend,” I answered with no little response and feeling in my voice, taking my seat opposite to him at the far end of the table, with Blenkinsopp on my right and Manders on my left. “I have felt it as acutely as you, I can assure you; and God knows, whatever may happen in these strange times we chance to have fallen upon, I shall never forget it or cease to be thankful that it fell to my lot, at the greatest crisis of my life, to have such a white man and such a friend to deal with. Both Manders and Blenkinsopp know everything and appreciate your magnanimity, your big abnegation, as much as I do.”
They both nodded, pulling hard at their cigars—some of the big Ramon Allones I had brought Burgess partly as a present, partly as an apology. At times of tenseness and crisis it is always the small and immaterial matters that catch one’s eye, as though the mind were seeking to catch at straws of outside relief.
“But there has been, as you may imagine, Burge, old chap,” I went on, speaking with a big grip on myself, “a very sound and sufficient reason for it all. In the first place, it was to save you unnecessary personal pain and anxiety while a very lurid and sensational theory was, to say the least of it, under suspicion; and it would have been unfair to suggest the most terrible possibilities, involving persons you are in a way interested in, without an atom of proof. However, I will not labour the point.”
Burgess looked me straight in the face.
“Of course, you mean that you consider that Professor Wolff is concerned in these ghastly affairs?” he said, coming straight to the point in his blunt, morally surgical fashion.
I nodded.
So did Manders and Blenkinsopp. Again the immaterial and frivolous would obtrude itself upon my tautened mind: and it suggested Chinese mandarins in comic opera.
“Yes,” I said, determined not to mince matters in view of what was coming; “and he involves Dorothy.”
Burgess flushed, that deeper difference between a man and a woman: and I thought of Ann’s blush only a short while before.
It was his turn to nod-curtly.
“Had it only been the Professor,” I went on, “I would gladly have risked the improbability of my apparently wild idea with you, my oldest friend but, as it involved a whole household, the tenants of your own Dower House, I was diffident, and preferred to risk being misunderstood for a time by the man whose love and opinion I place first of all things in this world—if he should fail me and misunderstand me, which, thank God, he didn’t. If he had, it might have brought matters to a head prematurely, which is the worst generalship in the world; amid he would have heard, to his own discontent, what God knows I would have given my very soul to keep from him.”
I didn’t mean or want to be intense or melodramatic—it is contrary t
o my whole nature and habit of life—but one must crave indulgence if, for once in a way in one’s life-time, the emotional side get the better of one’s control, and one’s brain race with too open a throttle. We live in an age of mechanical metaphor.
It was a relief when Manders poured himself out some whisky and squirted some soda into it.
“Bear this in mind throughout, Burge,” I went on, clearing the ground—“all I say, and we three believe, must be taken as referring actively only to Professor Wolff and old Anna Brunnolf. Where Dorothy conies in we will discuss later: but for the present you must put her, as far as possible, right apart in your judgment and consideration of things, as I am absolutely convinced that she is as completely ignorant and unsuspicious of what is behind anything that has occurred as you are—or Ann upstairs. She is merely the victim of circumstances and surroundings—a dear delightful growth in the hot-bed of this hell’s brood—as innocent as an unborn baby, not even suspicious of evil.”
“Thank God,” said Burgess with emphasis. “Now I can listen to and hear anything you have to tell me.”
And then, without further preliminaries, I plunged into the heart of things, repeating almost word for word all that I had told Sir Thomas Brayton, unfolding the tale logically in sequence, and marshalling the facts in proof of my theory. When I first mentioned the word “werewolf,” I saw utter incredulity written upon Burge’s candid face; and I felt that I had been right, and that here was my oldest friend more prepared to regard me as a lunatic at large than anyone else to whom I had so far broached the theory. At the same time, it was only natural, as it was further outside any possibility of his insular ken and habitual unimaginativeness than the receptive mentality of the others: and I had always realized, in my heart, that he would be the hardest of all to convince. He was prosaic by nature, his outlook agricultural, his surroundings bucolic, and his life the epitome of the happy commonplace, which the highly strung and neurotic are so woefully apt to underestimate. What he had ever heard of such phantasmagoria he had probably forgotten years before: and, so far as I was aware, they were certainly never mentioned as serious topics in the Times, the Field, or the Spectator. At the same time, I knew that I could count upon him for a most faithful and uninterrupted hearing: and it put me on my mettle.
